Is Xojo web for web sites

Can someone from Xojo Inc please advise if Xojo’s web app IDE is for building web sites? If not, can it be used for building and deploying web sites.

We have a few customers who have created websites in Xojo Web. One of the issues is that they cannot be indexed by the search engines, do if you rely on search traffic, it’s probably not a good fit.

[quote=106460:@Greg O’Lone]We have a few customers who have created websites in Xojo Web. One of the issues is that they cannot be indexed by the search engines, do if you rely on search traffic, it’s probably not a good fit.

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Thanks Greg. Anyway around this as it is virtually pointless trying to sell products on the web if customers cant search for your products?

I have sites I started back in the 90s that use primarily HTML, so they have a good search engine ranking, but I use Xojo apps for online purchase and delivery.

[quote=106469:@Michel Bujardet]I have sites I started back in the 90s that use primarily HTML, so they have a good search engine ranking, but I use Xojo apps for online purchase and delivery.

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I may have to use a combination of both. Since each product has many options and delivery choices, simple HTML is not going to do it for my site. Michel, can you have a look at my site at let me know if you have any suggestions.www.simquip.com

Yes, I know it already. Remember the menus and the stacked labels ?

From what I see, you could still create a majority of pages with static HTML, and use Xojo where it is necessary for dynamic content. For instance, you could very well use Xojo to build the menu and display it in an iFrame.

Not at the moment.

The problem is that search engines tend not to run any javascript on the page (for speed and security reasons), and frameworks like ours rely heavily on javascript. The initial page (which is all a search engine would get) is mostly empty except for the basic HTML page with links to go get the initial framework payload.

You could put keyword and description meta tags in the header, but the rules for search engines change all the time and most of them rely on some body text to help figure out what your site is all about.

Look at http://www.ezmeter.com/store.html for some ideas how to use Xojo in a website. Most of the site is straight html, but click the Continue button under Customized Meters and the Xojo app will load letting the user configure a meter to his exact needs.

[quote=108573:@Dean Davidge]Look at http://www.ezmeter.com/store.html for some ideas how to use Xojo in a website. Most of the site is straight html, but click the Continue button under Customized Meters and the Xojo app will load letting the user configure a meter to his exact needs.

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Pretty interesting stuff Dean. Interesting to see how you have embraced the Xojo technology to do stuff that would be much more difficult in pure HTML. The whole page is encapsulated without a single line of Java in sight. I like it!!

You can crawl Xojo Web apps but you’ll need to read how. :slight_smile:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/?csw=1

You would still need the ability to return plain html to satisfy the needs of the Google Ajax crawler, and at the moment you don’t have that ability.

You can create a sitemap and use a site-page generator along with a robot.txt file allowing (pointing out) the content to Google (bots). I’ll see if I can’t create a barebones open source solution tomorrow. Site will load in a web-browser, then pull the innerhtml content out of each page to be crawled, removing markup to create the site-pages and reference those using a robot.txt file. That’s how Twitter and other Ajax sites get crawled. Only downside is all the site “content” will reside in a directory next to the CGI and the robot.txt will need to reside next to the CGI as well. I know I can do it in Windows, perhaps with a plugin the innerhtml from a webapp could be pulled from an htmlviewer for Mac and Linux? (Think Christian might have an Htmlviewer plugin extension.)

I also suggest you study the Xojo WebSDK. To create a website, you will have much more freedom and opportunity.

But here too, the fact that the website is switched off when it is no longer network a few seconds is a problem (even if you do not use the WebSDK).

In order to get some visibility on Google, which accounts for the vast majority of requests, you absolutely need a sitemap, preferably at the root of the domain. Also, a Robot.txt file must be placed there as well. Adding keywords and description Meta can be done through the Page Source control for each webpage. The thorny point is that Google cannot “see” the content of a Xojo WebPage. hence the ranking will be poor as compared to plain HTML.

Mixing HTML and Xojo is probably the best of both worlds in terms of search engine optimization.

You may want to check http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

There was some recent news (can’t find it now though) about Google’s ramping up of it’s ability to execute and parse JavaScript, apparently it’s getting pretty good at it.

Wish I could find where I read that, but I distinctly remember reading references to it just a couple of weeks or so ago (before Google I/O).

Back to the original question: Xojo is good for building complex mechanics behind websites. For the website itself Xojo is not the proper tool. Like shooting mosquitos with a cannon.

Victor, you make a good point, but considering my skills in writing HTML and the fact that there isnt a template out there to do what I need for my web site, Xojo looks like a pretty attractive proposition. If what Ian Jones says in a few earlier posts is true, then by the time I finally learn Xojo and write my web app, then indexing should not be a problem.

Maybe it’s time to develop a proper library for injecting Xojo in regular HTML+CSS+jQuery build websites. I build that way with PHP. That gives all the benifits of pure HTML as well as the fast en safe scripting in Xojo.

Found the Google post … http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html

Although personally, I still think it’s a little early to be building “brochure” websites with a tool like Xojo, and especially given the startup latency of a Xojo web app, which will bash your ranking in Google and the like (they take performance characteristics into account these days).